But, could whiney Mike and Charlie have a point? If they do, then why tell lies to support their case? Shouldn’t a good case be able to stand on its merits and embrace the truth? When whiney Mike and Charlie claim that loose gun laws in other States allow felons to carry concealed guns, they’re lying. It’s always illegal for felons to possess firearms. This is a matter of Federal law. So why did whiney Mike and Charlie need to lie?

In most of California, concealed carry permits are fairly easy to get. California is a “may issue” State, but most counties operate under rules that are closer to “shall issue”. For those who don’t know, the latter means that a permit must be issued to someone if the authorities cannot find a reason not to do so. May issue means that issuance is entirely subjective; the sheriff or police department can issue to whomever they please. In counties like Los Angeles, that means friends of politicians, big donors, and celebrities. Not you, in other words! And if you’re visiting from another State, your permit isn’t valid here. Surprise! Your rights didn’t cross the State line with you.

National CCW reciprocity changes that. Your rights will apply here just as they do in your home State. It’s no different than your driver’s license. Furthermore, and this is what really has whiney Mike and Charlie’s panties in a wad, mere commoners from California would be able to get non-resident permits from others States that would be valid here. This is deliberate. Congressmen fromother States want to see Californians’ rights restored. No longer would self defense be a privilege for the well-to-do.

What Feuer and Beck fail to mention is that California’s powers that be brought this upon themselves. Their years of abusing the may issue system were tolerated by the courts because open carry was always an option. (Albeit, a very weird version of open carry!) Now open carry is illegal. That leaves no option for using a gun for self defense outside of the home. That’s not constitutional.

National Concealed Carry Reciprocity will put and end to the abuses Californians have suffered under politicians like Feuer and Beck. It will make us all equal in the eyes of the law. Whiney Mike and Charlie don’t want that to happen. They benefit too much from a system that allows them to dispense permits only to those who can help their political careers.

Like this:

Gun muggles may not be familiar with this saying: When seconds count, the police are only minutes away. It may, in fact, be many minutes depending on where you live in L.A.:

Police officers, as opposed to police administrators, are generally pro-gun. They see what goes horribly wrong when only the bad guy gets to use a gun. They also know all too well that their job usually doesn’t entail getting there in time to protect you. That leaves either showing up to take pictures of what’s left of you or taking your statement about why pulled a gun on (or shot) the bad guy. They prefer the latter. They have families too and were it their loved ones involved, they’d rather not see it go to that picture taking stage. They want their families to be armed and don’t begrudge you that same right.

A personal story (Yes, I realize that this is a data set with one and only one datum): We’ve only had to call 911 once here. While we didn’t expect the police to respond even in minutes, we were a little surprised when they finally did show up about 2 hours later. We’re in the West Valley division’s patrol area and we do see their cars quite often. Still, it’s more than a little unsettling to think that the response came hours rather than minutes later.

(This particular situation was one where I realized that the nutter on my front porch might actually be dangerous enough to warrant shooting; repeatedly. Fortunately, he cleared off when he realized that my wife really was on the phone with the police and not just doing her best Bob Newhart impression.)

Like this:

L.A. City Council votes to exempt retired and reserve police officers (i.e. former and current union members) from the city’s “high capacity” magazine ban. It’s not that the City Council believes that officers’ lives matter more than yours. It’s that you don’t dump loads of cash on them. And that money matters far more than the love and adoration of anti-gun groups. (Remember that calculation I was just talking about?)

With the incidents counted correctly, violent crime in the city was 7% higher than the LAPD reported in the period from 2005 to fall 2012, and the number of serious assaults was 16% higher, the analysis found.

…

The errors occurred during a time when the LAPD was reporting major drops in crime across the city. The Times analysis found the misclassified cases were not numerous enough to alter the overall downward trend.

Still, the findings are a mark against a department that has long been viewed as a national leader in using data to help deploy officers and set crime-fighting targets. When Mayor Eric Garcetti took office in 2013, he held up the LAPD’s data-tracking system as a model the rest of city government should emulate.

One wonders if the department would have added the secret sauce to their crime stats if a Hollywood A-lister or two got caught up in the mislabeled crimes. And now that I see that thought in writing, I wonder if they added the secret sauce because a Hollywood A-lister was caught up in one of the mislabeled crimes!

Like this:

The LAPD is pretty aggressive about both interpreting and enforcing State, local, and Federal gun laws; unless the objects of said enforcement are members of the LAPD. In that case, they tread ever so lightly.

Like this:

The FBI is now investigating the LAPD’s SWAT team for reselling specially branded Kimber firearms. The Feds were called in after an internal LAPD investigation went nowhere.

LAPD has a contract with Kimber that allows the company to produce handguns with the LAPD insignia. They’re worth up to $3500, but the LAPD gets them for $600. Though not stipulated in the contract, SWAT officers were able to get them at the discounted price.

No problems so far.

Trouble started when members of the 60-man team began pooling their money to buy the guns in bulk; around 300 of them. They then sold these to collectors and other LAPD officers at a profit. Now unless this was done through an FFL, that’s a Bozo-no-no; something you or I would go to jail for.

Now don’t get me wrong. These cops weren’t doing anything to harm public safety. This is a case of good guys selling guns to other good guys. It’s not at all like Barack Obama and Eric Holder selling guns to Mexican drug cartels. But if this was indeed done under the table, something mere mortals like us would be arrested for, then there are some cops out there who need to lawyer up and lawyer up fast.

Through their joint Legal Action Project, the NRA and CRPA Foundation are sponsoring two new legal actions to enforce a 16-year old court Order against the City of LA over its concealed weapons permit (CCW) issuance policies.

Under Penal Code § 12050, et seq., the LAPD has an obligation to process applications for CCWs, and to issue CCWs if the applicant has “good cause.” For many years, the City and the LAPD had a policy of not making applications available, never finding good cause to exist, and effectively prohibiting the issuance of any CCWs.

Two lawsuits filed in the 1990’s were supposed to change that. But despite a binding settlement in those suits that resulted in LAPD being ordered by a court to implement new policies, the LAPD has abandoned these court ordered policies for handling citizens’ applications for CCWs, and has fallen back on its old habits.

The City’s unlawful refusal to properly process CCW applications was challenged in two lawsuits in 1992 and 1994. To settle the suits the LAPD agreed to implement a specific and transparent court ordered procedure to provide clarity and fairness for citizens applying for CCWs. The LAPD agreed that all citizens who request a CCW permit application would be provided a CCW application at any LAPD station house, that the application would be accompanied by a written copy of the LAPD’s procedure for handling the application, and the applicants would be informed of the procedures for appealing the denial of a CCW application. The settlementalso resulted in the establishment of a Citizens Advisory Review Panel, made up of appointed citizens who would review CCW applications denied by the LAPD and make recommendations regarding whether the LAPD should reverse its denial of the CCW application.

The LAPD has repeatedly failed to honor its legal obligations under the settlements. The LAPD no longer makes CCW applications and a written copy of the CCW policy and appeal process available at all station houses. And the LAPD is ignoring the recommendations of the Citizens Advisory Review Panel and has instead enacted a de facto policy of again issuing no CCWs, despite whatever showing of good cause the applicants might make.

So in a city with almost 4 million citizens, with some 300 CCW applications being made per year, LAPD has only granted 24 active CCWs. Citizens who have had credible and ongoing threats made against them and their families, and those who carry large sums of cash as part of job and are high-profile robbery targets, have been repeatedly denied CCWs despite meeting the “good cause” criteria for receiving CCWs that the LAPD was forced to agree to years ago.

To rectify this situation, two new legal actions are being pursued. The first new court action is a motion to enforce the court’s old order in the 1994 case, Assenza v. City of Los Angeles. Some of the original plaintiffs from that case seek to force the LAPD to reinstate its agreed-to policy of providing applications and copies of its written policy at all LAPD station houses. In support of its motion, NRA grassroots activist citizens who were recruited to investigate the LAPD’s practices have submitted declarations about their recent attempts to get CCW applications. They were frustrated by uncooperative officers at individual stationhouses, all of whom had a complete lack of understanding of the LAPD’s application process, and who in almost all instances could not provide a CCW application to the requesting citizen, much less a copy of the LAPD’s written policy. Perhaps most egregiously, LAPD officers bluntly told citizens that unless they were celebrities, they shouldn’t even bother filling out the CCW application because they would be denied a CCW as a matter of LAPD policy.

The second action is a new lawsuit, Davis v. City of Los Angeles. The nine plaintiffs in this new action, some of whom have had CCW applications pending and unresolved with the LAPD for years, have submitted sworn declarations attesting to a litany of missteps and abuses by LAPD in its handling of their CCW applications. These abuses include not only the failures to provide applications and copies of the written policies at stationhouses, but refusals to timely consider their applications, failures to respond to inquiries regarding the status of applications, failures to acknowledge the availability of the Citizens Advisory Review Panel as a method of appealing denial, and the failure to give any weight to recommendations by the Citizens Advisory Review Panel.

Second Amendment challenges may be incorporated into these lawsuits as the case law develops in the Ninth Circuit, where another NRA/CRPAF LAP case, Peruta v. San Diego, is currently being heard.

Seventeen years ago the NRA and CRPA joined forces to fight local gun bans being written and pushed in California by the gun ban lobby. Their coordinated efforts became the NRA/CRPA “Local Ordinance Project” (LOP) – a statewide campaign to fight ill conceived local efforts at gun control and educate politicians about available programs that are effective in reducing accidents and violence without infringing on the rights of law-abiding gun owners. The NRA/CRPA LOP has had tremendous success in beating back most of these anti-self-defense proposals.

In addition to fighting local gun bans, for decades the NRA has been litigating dozens of cases in California courts to promote the right to self-defense and the Second Amendment. In the post Heller and McDonald legal environment, NRA and CRPA Foundation have formed the NRA/CRPA Foundation Legal Action Project (LAP), a joint venture to pro-actively strike down ill-conceived gun control laws and ordinances and advance the rights of firearms owners, specifically in California. Sometimes, success is more likely when LAP’s litigation efforts are kept low profile, so the details of every lawsuit are not always released. To see a partial list of the LAP’s recent accomplishments, or to contribute to the NRA or to the NRA / CRPAF LAP and support this and similar Second Amendment cases, visit www.nraila.com and www.crpafoundation.org.

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Like this:

In response to the police shooting of a Los Angeles teenager, state lawmakers on Tuesday backed a requirement that BB and pellet guns be made entirely with bright colors so that officers do not mistake them for deadly firearms.

The bill in question is SB 798 authored by Sen. Kevin De Leon (D-Los Angeles) and supported by LAPD Chief Charlie Beck and LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. I’d like to pose the following question to Messrs. De Leon, Beck and Villaraigosa: Is this a BB gun?

It is, after all, brightly colored. And, according to your bill, its bright, cheery colors just scream “Hello Mr. Officer! I’m just a BB gun. I am obviously in the hands of a child. Put your gun away. I’m not a threat!”

Have you ever heard something that’s come out of an anti-gun politician’s mouth and the first response that popped into your head was something obscene? Of course, you stifled that response didn’t you. Calling someone a dangerous schmuck just isn’t proper in polite political discourse. But there are times when we are confronted with stupidity of such colossal scale that polite just doesn’t cover the situation.